Director’s Message

The Texas Analog Center of Excellence (TxACE) is leading analog research and education. Over the past year, TxACE researchers published 24 journals, 59 conference papers and made 10 invited presentations. We also filed 9 patent applications and 2 invention disclosures. 3 patents were granted. 37 Ph.D., 8 M.S., and 2 B.S. students have completed their degree program.

Last year, the Center funded 82 research tasks led by 73 principal investigators at 28 institutions, including three international universities in India, Taiwan, and Canada. The Center supported 215 graduate and undergraduate students.

The Center is continuing to make impact to the industry and our way of life through its research accomplishments. There are always too many to list all.

A partial list includes demonstration of a temperature and aging compensated RC Oscillator that achieves an inaccuracy of ±1030 ppm over 40°C to 85°C after 500 hours of accelerated aging at 125°C, improvement of efficiency of power delivery from highvoltage busses to scaled CMOScompatible voltages (<1V) by ~10% employing a vertically and heterogeneously integrated architecture leveraging hybrid and switchedcapacitor DCDC converters, capturing STEM images of pGaN Emode HEMTs with insitu bias for electrical stress, a hybrid ADC in 28nm CMOS that combines a VCObased continuoustime deltasigma modulator with a noiseshaping successive approximation register quantizer that achieves an 84.2dB signaltonoisedistortion ratio and an 86.8dB dynamic range while consuming 1.62mW at 100MS/s, and a programmable accelerator for DNN in 28nm CMOS for edge applications achieving 3.1 μJ perinference with 90.2% accuracy on the CIFAR10 benchmark.

The TxACE laboratory is continuing to help advance integrated circuit research by making its instruments and expertise available to researchers and our industrial partners all over the world.

I am pleased to share the news that TxACE has been renewed by SRC for another three years with a total support of $19.3 Million. I would like to thank UT Dallas, the University of Texas System, TI, and SRC, as well as many friends of TxACE all over the world for their generous support. Lastly, I would like to thank the students, principal investigators and staff for their efforts, and I look forward to another year of working with the TxACE team to make our way of life better, safer, healthier and more energy efficient through our research, education and innovation.

Kenneth K. O, Director TxACE
Texas Instruments Distinguished University Chair Professor
The University of Texas at Dallas